UP FRONT
Evangelization Movements Today
Frank P. DeSiano

A sharper focus is needed if we as church are to respond to the call to evangelize those who are in the pews, those who have left them, and those who haven’t yet heard the gospel.

A lot of eyebrows were raised recently when a survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that mainline churches had lost 25 percent of their membership over the past thirty years, while the Catholic church had lost 30 percent. Reports about the survey noted that many of these people had migrated to churches styled as evangelical or non-denominational, while the total population of Catholics appeared to remain steady only because of immigration. The surprise of the survey did not consist in the general trend; rather, that the Catholic church had lost a disproportionately larger amount seemed to take the Catholic community aback.

One way to think about evangelization is to reflect on background patterns, showing general trends, and foreground patterns, showing how evangelization activities fare at the present moment. Catholics have tended to think of themselves as separate, virtually in a category by themselves, probably because of the tight ethnic-based patterns that have colored the way U.S. Catholics see themselves. But Catholics no longer reside in a bubble. Catholics are as subject to broader trends in the culture as any other denomination. Even Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who would appear to have high social cohesion as a buttress to faith, suffer attrition equal to their converts, according to the CUNY Religious Identity Survey. No one today easily escapes the pressures of culture.

Recent authors have looked at some of these trends, concentrating, not surprisingly, on the universe of young adults. Jesuit Thomas Rausch surveyed the world of Catholic young adults in Being Catholics in a Culture of Choice giving concrete expression to data later assembled by William D’Antiono, et al., in their 2007 American Catholics Today: New Realities of their Faith and their Church. Robert Wuthnow lent his legendary scholarship to the study of the post–baby boomer generation in After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty-and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Mike Hayes, of the Paulist young adult ministry Busted Halo, culled impressions of young adults in Googling God: The Religious Landscape of People in their 20s and 30s. All these students and observers indicate that, as far as a stable Catholic community is concerned, as the saying goes, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The Background: Choice

Rausch’s title captures the Catholic dilemma at this point: we have clearly entered a culture of choice whereby the patterns young people receive from their families come to compete with patterns from society at large. These patterns are shaped by an overall cultural myth which says that the process of maturing involves leaving behind what one has received, “finding oneself,” and remaking one’s life according to one’s dreams. As such, the value of a tradition, with its distinct language and behaviors, becomes relative. Identity no longer comes from children absorbing the culture of their parents, but rather from staking out one’s chosen position in the marketplace of choice. Inherent in this scheme is the “relativism” long bemoaned by Catholics. One’s choice is one’s choice. The norm belongs to the chooser, who alone validates the choice. This makes it much more difficult to argue that one choice is better than another.

The trend toward choice, and away from tradition, contains two particular threats for Catholics today. First, religion in the public mind has shifted from being based on “exterior verifications” to a mindset where the basis of faith is totally internal. The “objectivity” of faith has receded in the modern mind to such an extent that a person’s internal “assurance” is sufficient to sustain the choice. Second, what has grounded Catholic life most of all—the sacraments—represent the “tradition” from which people tend to flee today. In other words, as valuable as the Eucharist is for Catholics, and as much as they think of the Eucharist as one of their strongest attractors, for the modern world it holds (at least initially) no decisive edge. Ritual has become almost a dirty word today.

None of this means that Catholic values, grounding the formation of young people, will be ultimately pointless. Rather, it means that Catholic formation will not have the same social consequences in the future as it had in the past. (Indeed, it has not had that same impact for almost forty years.) While informally one might attribute the absence of social cohesion since 1970 to the changes of the Second Vatican Council or new approaches in catechesis, one can far more assuredly attribute these to today’s context, the culture of choice, which achieved ascendancy in the 1960s. Had we stayed with the Baltimore catechism with its rote memorization throughout the second half of the twentieth century, it is unlikely that adherence to Catholic forms would be any different from the way it is now. Catholic formation of the young, then, will be basically a process equipping them for entrance into the marketplace of spirituality in America today.

The Foreground: Focus

Within our Catholic communities, evangelization and its attendant activities have not had a strong start, nor do they seem easy to sustain. Catholics seem unable to focus, or stay focused, on evangelization.

Go and Make Disciples: A Pastoral Plan and Strategy for Evangelization in the United States, issued by the bishops of the United Sates in 1992, serves as something of a benchmark for looking at Catholic initiatives in evangelization. The plan proposed three basic goals, along with objectives and strategies to attain these goals. While its effectiveness has not been scientifically measured, the truth is that the bishops’ plan has proven much harder to implement than to conceive. Certainly various dioceses and parishes have either “adopted” the plan or have used it to stir up interest in evangelization. But if that plan was supposed to engender a widespread appropriation of an evangelizing attitude (that is, focused on outreach, renewal, and societal transformation), it can certainly be called a failure, at least so far.

Among the basic problems in Catholic evangelization was (and is) the lack of any central implementing force, due, undoubtedly, to the very structure of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (and, not incidentally, the structure of dioceses). The USCCB has only tangential jurisdiction over individual ordinaries and dioceses; further, it has no implementing arm. To put out a plan is, in effect, to put out a set of exhortations. Similarly, diocesan bishops, even though they have direct jurisdiction over their parishes, have to exert unlimited energy to attempt to get their pastors and parish leaders lined up behind any new idea, particularly if it appears to entail getting either more work or more money out of the clergy and parishioners.

To the extent that the plan called for evangelization teams that would coordinate new evangelizing activities in parishes, the plan presumed that doing this would be easier than it has actually been. It is unlikely that more than 15 percent of parishes have anything like an evangelization team. A more subtle (but formidable) obstacle is the human reality that evangelization is not magic. Teams and ministers have to consistently work from an energetic vision. It is likely that parishes will “try something” and then give up, especially when they see “it doesn’t work.” Sustaining focus is the challenge.

In fact, Catholic evangelization has been looking for something like “the magic bullet” for decades. Catholics want “something that works,” by which Catholics mean a virtually infallible set of activities or programs that produce unquestionable results. For some Catholics this might mean parroting the marketing strategies of evangelical or non-denominational churches. But even these strategies have limits, at least according to recent observations that the growth of these kinds of churches has leveled off (Wuthnow, 75-76).

Movements and Programs

Another version of “the magic bullet” revolves around “the movements” (see related article, page 15). If bishops want their Catholic people enthusiastic, involved, and committed, perhaps, some think, this cannot happen within the parish structure itself. Perhaps Catholics need a renewal experience, such as the kind provided by the Cursillo Movement or the Charismatic Movement, the Neo-Catechumenate, Regnum Christi, or other movements. (Incidentally, saying this seems tantamount to saying that, indeed, something basic is missing in ordinary Catholic experience, that living the commitment involved in general parish life simply is not enough. If so, this is a sad and pastorally telling admission.) While these movements clearly have something to offer people who are searching for something more in faith, it is hardly likely that a concerted effort to get all Catholics involved in one or another movement will be successful, or even make sense.

A less radical direction than movements involves renewal programs, such as those produced by Renew International or the “Disciples in Mission” program of the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association (PNCEA). These kinds of activities, which bring Catholics together for study and sharing, have certainly proved to be just about the only viable form of widespread adult education and more intense involvement in church. Nevertheless, all these programs come to an end, usually after three years, and they only reach about 10-20 percent of those Catholics going to church. They do indeed attract people “on the edge,” but their main constituency seems to be those already in the pews.

Emblematic of the difficulties of Catholic evangelizing experience is the attitude of Catholic priests to evangelization. Very few dioceses have devoted their occasional convocations or study days to evangelization. Priests, by and large, give lip service to evangelization, but do not appear keen on what they perceive as the extra work needed to implement evangelizing activities. The more general attitude of clergy seems to be: we work hard enough and have plenty of people coming now. Why do we want more? (But, Father, just wait a few years!)

All of this comes down, first, to the inability of the church to focus on those people who are particular objects of evangelizing outreach—those who have no church and those who have stopped practicing their faith. Whatever homage the church pays to the idea of evangelization, inertia makes it tend to concentrate on those who come to church, forgetting those who do not. The church, second, seems to have an inability to develop simple strategies of evangelization and to stick with these strategies. When it comes to evangelization, Catholics appear like children with attention deficit disorder, taking interest in something for a moment, dropping that interest for something else, and wondering why it all seems boring.

Directions

What might be some directions that the church can take in view of what is happening generally in society today, as well as in terms of its particular initiatives for evangelization? The following seem worthy of further consideration:

1. We have to do extensive outreach to “inactive Catholics,” as they are usually termed, but we cannot have simplistic ideas about this very diverse group. Certain people can reasonably be invited “back” to the church because they have some sense of church already from their formation. However, it makes no sense to invite “back” whole categories of people because either (a) they never had a sense of church or (b) had such a loose sense of church that such an invitation would seem unintelligible.
   
   
2. We need to develop a whole set of programming for people to experience on a basic level (re)conversion in community. This would involve both catechesis and religious-communal experiences. It needs both to be directed toward people who are under forty years of age and also, to a large extent, to be directed by young people. It has to fit the needs and styles of post–Vatican II generations.
   
   
3. A separate set of programs would be needed to address the needs of people who, having some sense of faith, wanted to work their way back to the church. Approaches such as those used by Catholics Coming Home, Landings, and Revisiting Faith need to be amplified and experimented with to try to reach this population, some of whom are sending their children to church for religious instruction.
   
   
4. We also need some limited adoption of some “evangelical” textures—the drama of the word of God, application of God’s word to the inner and outer states of people, dynamic music, and preaching—to augment our often overly formatted liturgical expression. This can be done while being in total fidelity to various Vatican documents and preserving the needed integrity of the Eucharist. Fidelity to the church hardly means behaving as if everything ran on automatic pilot.
   
   
5. Parishes either need to institute or reinvigorate their ministries of welcome, hospitality, and inviting others into service in the parish and wider community. All Catholics “shop” for their parishes today. They need a reason to prefer one congregation to another. All too often today, Catholics seem willing to shop even in non-Catholic congregations for what they feel they need.
   
   
6. Parishes need to review their reluctance to adopt explicit outreach strategies of wider invitation, public relations, and outreach programming, particularly with reference to young adults. Young adults themselves need to be given a place in the parish or, perhaps, more radically, their own designated parishes. Pastoral agents need to dust off their copies of Evangelization in the Modern World: Go and Make Disciples and classic texts on evangelization; even better, after looking at them again, pastoral agents need to give these to their pastoral councils.
   
   
7. At some point the Catholic church needs to inaugurate a “recommitment” movement whereby it explicitly invites Catholics to renew their covenant as disciples. Such a movement would need periods of catechetical and spiritual preparation, as well as appropriate signs of identity to reinforce the decision Catholics have made.
   
   
8. Catholics need to be particularly aware that a culture of choice is not the same thing as a culture of heresy (which, in its Greek root, means choice). Rather, choice talks about the fragmented world of people today and how they have to put that world together from their experience (in effect, be “pilgrims”). People must be given a lot of time for this to happen in their lives. The church cannot let the better become the enemy of the good, insisting that people be at points in their lives which are, in fact, pastorally impossible. Just to have people working on these points is already to involve them in the Kingdom; just to have people considering the church once again, with its principal message of the gospel of Jesus, is a wonderful grace.

God’s purposes are surely and secretly being served even by the unfocused and sporadic interest that Catholics have in evangelization. Those purposes can, however, become clearer. Given the undeniable trends happening across American culture in religious communities, Catholics need to focus again on their great heritage of faith, learning the methods of how better to instill that heritage in a world of choice that, having experienced great change, will undoubtedly experience it even more in the future.

The Rev. Frank P. DeSiano, CSP, long involved in pastoral ministry and evangelization leadership, will become president of the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association in January 2009, while continuing to serve on the leadership team of the Paulist Fathers.